Jann Wenner Wants to Reveal It All

MONTAUK, N.Y. — Rock could also be useless, however Jann Wenner continues to be rolling.

The founding father of Rolling Stone journal all the time had a child face, however he was by no means timid. His personal mom instructed him he was essentially the most troublesome little one she’d ever encountered. He edited tales with a crimson pen. He gave out roach clips with subscriptions. He turned a darkroom into an in-house drug-dealing operation known as the Capri Lounge, as a perk for staffers.

“Greater than anybody I do know, he’s all the time simply accomplished what he needed,” stated his buddy Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Evening Stay.”

When it suited him, Mr. Wenner was a tyrant.

“I wasn’t raving round tearing up folks’s copy,” he stated, wanting relaxed in a blue linen shirt and black pants at his Montauk house in August. “However I simply wouldn’t take lower than your actually greatest effort. I used to be powerful, however I used to be additionally super-indulgent. I believed in writers.”

Hunter S. Thompson as soon as wrote Mr. Wenner a letter about how working for Rolling Stone was “like being invited right into a bonfire and discovering out the fireplace is definitely your buddy.” He added, “Some folks have been fried to cinders, as I recall, and a few folks used the warmth to transmogrify themselves into heroes.”

That wild power is how, in 1967 when he was a 21-year-old enfant horrible, he created {a magazine} that chronicled a era, serving up a flambé of music, medicine, alcohol, intercourse and politics. It was, to make use of a Wenner phrase, “a king hell spectacle.”

Boomers could also be a punchline now, however again then, they have been groovy. Ralph Gleason, a founding editor of Rolling Stone, wrote that the journal was predicated on the concept nice musicians have been “the true shamans,” and that music was the glue that saved younger folks within the Sixties and Seventies from falling aside “within the face of unimaginable grownup blindness, and ignorance and evilness.”

“I’m sorry to see it go,” Mr. Wenner stated about rock ’n’ roll. “It’s not coming again. It’ll find yourself like jazz.”

Now 76, he has written a memoir (“Like a Rolling Stone,” out on Sept. 13) brimming with juicy anecdotes about friendships and feuds with the gods of the golden age of rock. He additionally dishes on the inimitable writers he nurtured on the journal, like Mr. Thompson, the avatar of gonzo journalism, and Tom Wolfe, a bespoke surprise in white among the many shaggy hippies. Mr. Wenner additionally supplies an intimate — she might imagine too intimate — take a look at Annie Leibovitz, the photographer who began her profession at Rolling Stone and who took the moody cowl shot of Mr. Wenner for the brand new autobiography.

Mr. Wenner virtually died in 2017, after he broke his femur in a fall when he was displaying his son Noah easy methods to enhance his tennis serve and had a coronary heart assault that required open-heart surgical procedure. He had to surrender his daredevil habits of snowboarding, bike using and chain-smoking Marlboros. He stated he had stopped doing coke lengthy earlier than, labeling it the “nefarious drug.”

However even sitting quietly together with his cane at his facet, consuming a bowl of cherries, he nonetheless has one thing of the whirlwind about him. Trying a bit chagrined, he confessed that he loved a little bit of LSD a month in the past on the seashore, listening to Bruce Springsteen, U2, Dire Straits and Bob Dylan. “Unbelievable,” he stated.

“Pot is simply too troublesome on my throat to smoke, and edibles final too lengthy,” he stated. “Coke is enjoyable for events however then it’s ineffective.”

He had simply gotten again from taking his household on a safari with the household of Bette Midler, one among his favourite touring companions, who says she finds him “peculiarly optimistic, even within the darkest of his days.”

We had lunch by the ocean on the deck of Mr. Wenner’s spectacular trendy house, that includes a basketball court docket, swimming pool, tomato backyard, a sculpture of an enormous metallic head mendacity on its facet and Ralph Lauren and Invoice O’Reilly as neighbors. We ate gazpacho with caviar and roasted Montauk black sea bass, ready by his chef, and drank rosé. The music on faucet was nuevo flamenco.

Mr. Wenner lives right here in Montauk — and generally in Manhattan and Solar Valley, Idaho — together with his husband, Matt Nye, a good-looking designer who has labored at Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, and their three youngsters. His ex-wife, Jane, with whom he has three grown sons — their names are engraved on a silver ID bracelet he’s carrying — has a home close by.

One of many authentic staffers at Rolling Stone, the attractive and trendy Jane was instrumental in serving to Mr. Wenner get his journal off the bottom (her mother and father gave him cash to get began). She was his muse and charmed the folks he wanted, appearing as “an ethereal housemother.” Gus Wenner, Jann and Jane’s youngest son, is now the C.E.O. of the Jann-less Rolling Stone.

Mr. Wenner determined to put in writing his personal memoir after he first labored carefully with, after which grew disenchanted with, Joe Hagan, who wrote a biography of the editor in 2017 known as “Sticky Fingers.”

The New York Instances known as it “a supple, assured, dispassionately reported and deeply well-written biography.” Mr. Wenner disagrees.

“I made a horrible selection of a author, who turned out to be a gossip reporter greater than a very cautious in-depth author,” Mr. Wenner stated. “I gave him this nice alternative to have a look at my archives, however he was too within the sensational gossip stuff.”

Mr. Hagan responded to this in an e mail: “I nonetheless have an affection for Jann and I’m flattered that I might encourage him to put in writing his personal guide, even when he fails to credit score me. Whereas his ‘gossip’ feedback are hilarious coming from the previous writer of Us Weekly, I additionally discover it unhappy how blind he’s to the journalistic ambition of my guide, which was an homage to the fashion and spirit of Rolling Stone at its greatest — Jann’s true legacy.”

Rolling Stone and the Stones

Mr. Wenner grew up within the rural suburbs of San Rafael, Calif., the son of former army officers who began a child formulation firm. He preferred to sing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

By sixth grade, he was already the editor and writer of The Weekly Trumpet. As a freshman at Berkeley, he was ripping wire copy for Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on the 1964 Republican Nationwide Conference in San Francisco, the place Barry Goldwater turned the nominee.

Working Rolling Stone required particular abilities. Mr. Wenner needed to mould the copy into one thing readable after drug-fueled interviews, just like the one he did with Jimi Hendrix. And he needed to edit the work of Mr. Thompson, who cherished his cocaine and whose workplace provides included Wild Turkey and beer on faucet, and an air horn.

Mr. Thompson’s first dispatch from D.C., when he coated George McGovern’s 1972 marketing campaign, started like this: “I really feel the worry approaching, and the one remedy for that’s to chew up a fats black wad of blood-opium concerning the measurement of a younger meatball.”

Cameron Crowe, the moviemaker, was 15 when he started writing for the journal. He stated Mr. Wenner’s secret was that “he saved it private,” constructing “a household out of geeky music lovers, hopeful upstarts, gunslinger professionals.”

Mr. Wenner recounts in the future early within the journal when Mick Jagger stopped by for blow and a protracted go to. On one other, Ms. Leibovitz dropped three giant rocks of coke on his desk as “a present from Keith for you.”

“Cocaine had a stranglehold on the music enterprise,” Mr. Wenner writes within the memoir. “Medicine have been the coin of the realm, enabling unhealthy habits, unhealthy relationships, and lapses of judgment throughout.”

Dinner events might need silver trays of neatly organized strains of coke handed round each half-hour. When John Belushi fell off a stage doing his samurai skit and ended up within the hospital, together with his leg in a solid suspended by wires, he mischievously pulled out a vial of coke hidden within the solid to point out his buddy Jann.

Battle-of-interest guidelines on the journal have been blurry. Mr. Wenner turned quick associates with Mick Jagger. Mr. Jagger, who, in keeping with Rolling Stone’s rely, has been on the duvet 21 instances, topped solely by Paul McCartney with 24, agreed to finance a British model of the journal, which shortly tanked.

When Mr. Jagger put out a solo album with Wyclef Jean known as “Goddess within the Doorway” in 2001, Mr. Wenner watched them at a recording session producing what he thought-about a “bewitching” sound — “particularly after slightly pot” — after which reviewed it for the journal. When the file assessment editor put 4 stars on the assessment, Mr. Wenner added an extra star.

“There was some snickering about being on Mick’s leash,” he writes, “however so what, and what if I have been?” (Keith Richards known as the album a spicier model of “Canine Doo within the Doorway.”)

The friendship had its rocky moments. Mr. Wenner assigned a full-court press on the Stones’s lethal live performance on the Altamont Speedway in 1969 after the Hells Angels, introduced in to deal with safety, killed an 18-year-old Black man in entrance of the stage. He knew that Mr. Jagger could be offended when among the blame fell on him and the Stones’s tour supervisor, who introduced within the Hells Angels.

After the publication of the 17-page article, which known as it “rock ’n’ roll’s all-time worst day,” Mr. Jagger declined an interview request and despatched Mr. Wenner a frosty telegram, saying, “rightly or wrongly we now not belief you to cite us absolutely or in context.”

They made up and grew nearer over time.

Mr. Wenner tells an amusingly indiscreet story about being in Barbados with Mr. Jagger and Ms. Leibovitz. One evening everybody was sipping cognac and Bianca Jagger was on the lookout for her husband. He quickly confirmed up, Mr. Wenner writes, “with sand on the knees of his white trousers. Annie adopted a couple of minutes later. Bianca walked out and not using a phrase and there was a common sigh of aid. Then she returned with a big pot of water and poured it over Mick’s head. It was hilarious. Justice!”

Two pages later, he writes that Ms. Leibovitz tried to soak up Jane Wenner’s fashion and frolicked together with her always. “Annie was additionally in love with Jane, although I didn’t know that on the time, nor would I’ve even thought of it.”(Ms. Leibovitz didn’t reply with a remark.)

After spilling a lot ink on the magic of Mick, it’s a shock when, close to the tip of his guide, Mr. Wenner reveals that he stopped going to Stones live shows as a result of they have been “an oldies” revue.

“Since I’ve to make use of a cane to get round, going to see them at a coliseum, it’s identical to, why?” he instructed me. “It’s an fascinating present, however I’ve seen it 20 instances.” (In the event that they performed at Barclays Heart in Brooklyn, he stated, he’d go.)

In a single Rolling Stone cowl story, Mr. Jagger stated he didn’t need to be singing “Satisfaction” when he was 42. He’s singing it at 79.

“Now they’re older and Keith has actually slowed down,” Mr. Wenner stated. “Mick continues to be a miracle, however he’s so previous wanting.”

“I don’t thoughts,” Mr. Wenner added, “however they appear like folks out of ‘Lord of the Rings’ or one thing.”

Mr. Wenner stated Bob Dylan, Bono, and U2 and his pal Bruce Springsteen are nonetheless price seeing as a result of they’re nonetheless attempting to be authentic.

As soon as in Solar Valley, earlier than Mr. Wenner’s extreme well being points started, Mr. Springsteen requested his buddy how he saved snowboarding day-after-day.

“As a result of I hold champagne, pot cookies and Percocet,” Mr. Wenner replied. “Have you ever ever had Percocet, Bruce? Strive it. It’s not too late to throw your life away.”

For his birthday, Mr. Springsteen wrote a ditty for his buddy, singing, “I’ve by no means seen a lot innocence and cynicism stroll facet by facet. Champagne, pot cookies and a Percocet hold him rolling stoned.”

Mr. Wenner additionally had an advanced, shut relationship with the Beatles. John Lennon put Rolling Stone on the map. In 1968, they did a canopy utilizing the bare image of John and Yoko holding fingers that Mr. Lennon’s file firm had banned for his or her first file collectively, “Two Virgins.”

“Nude Beatle Perils S.F.” was the headline in The San Francisco Chronicle; the problem was banned in Boston. “All of the fuss,” Mr. Wenner writes, “got here right down to an historic precept of public relations: ‘Print a well-known foreskin and the world will beat a path to your door.’”

In 1970, for Mr. Lennon’s first solo album, Mr. Wenner frolicked with the couple — “John and Yoko referred to themselves within the third particular person as Liz and Dick” — and interviewed an offended Mr. Lennon, who unleashed on “the darkish facet” of the Beatles. Mr. Lennon was offended on the approach he perceived that his bandmates have been treating Yoko, Mr. Wenner stated.

The ex-Beatle stated he wouldn’t trouble to play George Harrison’s solo album at house; he known as Paul’s solo album “garbage,” and “mild and simple”; he stated Bob Dylan was B.S., including snidely “Zimmerman is his identify”; and he accused Mr. Jagger and the Stones of mimicking the Beatles’s music, asserting, “‘Satanic Majesties’ is ‘Pepper.’

Towards Mr. Lennon’s needs, Mr. Wenner printed “Lennon Remembers” — which Mr. Lennon had begun calling “Lennon Regrets” — as a guide. Mr. Lennon was offended. The 2 by no means noticed one another once more, and 10 years later John was shot. Mr. Wenner went to the Dakota and when he commiserated with Ms. Ono, she positioned Mr. Lennon’s glasses, with dried blood on them, in his fingers.

He turned nearer to Mr. McCartney after Mr. Lennon died. (Funnily sufficient, he writes that he gave Linda Eastman, “a comely blonde from Scarsdale,” her project to go to London and {photograph} the Beatles, which was much less pushed by aesthetics than that she needed to fulfill Mr. McCartney, whom she would later marry. “She despatched me postcards from London, detailing her pursuit of him,” Mr. Wenner writes.)

From Hippie to Yuppie, and Different Adjustments

In 1977, Mr. Wenner moved the journal to New York from San Francisco. He befriended the Kennedys. He put Donna Summer time on the duvet and used stylists to make the Jefferson Starship look glamorous. He began carrying three-piece fits and removed his journal’s “hippie potpourri” design.

“I started to listen to that we had ‘bought out,’ which had been a sour-grapes gripe I used to be proof against,” he writes, including: “I suppose my very own way of life and friendships in New York legitimized quite a lot of that.”

Mr. Wenner ran an advert marketing campaign in 1985 known as “Notion vs. Actuality” to shed the journal’s hippie picture. There have been contrasting photos of pot brownies with Häagen-Dazs; cash with an American Categorical card; George McGovern with Ronald Reagan.

Hunter Thompson lambasted the shift to the mainstream, with a rant in opposition to BMWs, pesto and gossip, saying: “Bon Jovi, , what colour he paints his fingernails is extra necessary than the truth that Ronald Reagan is president. I believe Jann, within the darkness of his non-public nights, ought to be ashamed, and is ashamed, as a result of Rolling Stone is just not extra of a weapon than a instrument.”

As Mr. Wenner obtained extra buttoned-up, his mom turned extra bohemian. She moved to Hawaii and have become a hippie, elevating pet goats and taking acid together with her astrologer/guru. And he or she turned a lesbian.

“My mom’s homosexual? I simply thought, she’s my mom, for Christ’s sake,” Mr. Wenner stated. “What’s happening?” The final straw, he stated, was when she obtained concerned in what he termed “a sex-and-scam cult.”

“Someplace alongside the road I spotted that I didn’t like being round her,” he writes, including, “No love was misplaced. Even our little canine growled and snapped when she confirmed up.”

He didn’t have a lot endurance for her very public sexual exploration. “I wasn’t disapproving or detrimental; I simply didn’t need to hear any extra intimate data,” he stated. “What son needs to listen to about his mother’s” intimate life? Mr. Nye weighed in on this, smiling: “His mother was an utter authentic.”

Mr. Wenner knew he preferred males in addition to ladies at an early age. He rubbed up in opposition to a fellow pupil in boarding faculty. He used “gay ideation” to get out of the draft. He had a fling with a younger man from England. However he was pleased with Jane.

In 1994, although, he turned infatuated with Mr. Nye.“I didn’t need to be open about being homosexual, and by no means mentioned it with my closest associates or colleagues,” he writes. “I used to be having one of the best of each worlds and had been for years.”

He didn’t need to damage Jane or his three younger kids however he was mooning over Matt, so he poured all of it out to her. She instructed him to depart and he moved right into a lodge on Madison Avenue.(Ms. Wenner didn’t reply to a request for remark.)

“Jane stabilized at first,” he writes. “She had associates and cash, however she couldn’t let go of me. She phoned day-after-day, both appearing as if nothing had occurred or, if she was stoned, doubling down on her humiliation, rejection, and my ‘sudden determination’ that I used to be homosexual. She would unleash anger and abuse as I listened, silenced with guilt.”

It took a while, and sensitivity on Mr. Nye’s half. Mr. Wenner writes that when he and Matt revealed they have been having their very own little one, Jane “took it arduous” and he felt “guilt and distress.” A 15-year-old Gus, protecting of his mom, cried and stated he “hated” Matt. However Mr. Wenner stated they ultimately blended into a contemporary household.

He hates the phrase “popping out of the closet” as a result of it appeared like a “shameful cliché, that darkish and stuffy closet. Debutantes got here out.”

“I used to be involved about it, however I wasn’t that involved,” he stated. “I by no means misplaced a buddy due to it.”

The Finish of the Journal Period

Moreover Rolling Stone, Mr. Wenner co-founded Exterior, which he bought in 1979, two years after it began, and based Males’s Journal, which he bought in 2017. He acquired Us Weekly, which within the early 2000s obtained so profitable that it was making greater than Rolling Stone.

Because the proprietor and C.E.O. of Us Weekly, he was aware about all of the superstar secrets and techniques.

“A photographer we labored with acquired a tip that Angelina Jolie was at a resort on the coast of Africa on a secret journey with then-married Brad Pitt,” he writes. “The tipster additional specified a time and place the place they walked day-after-day and steered we might ‘secretly’ do a photograph ambush. We obtained the photograph, we obtained the proof, we had the worldwide scoop, the debut of Brangelina. The tipster was Angelina.”

Mr. Wenner can boast of a lot exceptional journalism except for music in Rolling Stone: tales about Patty Hearst, Karen Silkwood, Charles Manson, AIDS, local weather change. He did interviews with presidents and presidential candidates, enduring two of Invoice Clinton’s “purple matches” of rage.

With lingering misery, he talks concerning the nadir for his journal, the 2014 publication of “A Rape on Campus” about an alleged brutal gang assault on a sufferer with the pseudonym of “Jackie” in a fraternity home on the College of Virginia. However “Jackie” had made it up.

“Our funds cuts had left us understaffed,” he writes. “Nonetheless, pseudonyms, lack of corroborating sources, and our sympathy for the sufferer, which made us reluctant to problem her, have been all warning indicators.”

When Rolling Stone was born, music was a cultural and political drive on this nation. Now music is usually disconnected from social change.

“The issues have turn out to be very trivialized,” Mr. Wenner stated. “It’s quite a lot of Taylor Swift and her disagreements together with her superstar boyfriends.” When he began the journal, he writes,, the readership was 90 % male, and the star writers have been male. “It was a macho period,” he instructed me. (Later, he stated, readership evened out.)

“The music right now is pushed by teenage women,” he stated. “In the present day’s music, hip-hop, pop music, I don’t take heed to as a lot, and I don’t suppose it’s as culturally related because it was, neither is it musically pretty much as good. However I believe a few of it, significantly hip-hop, may be very sturdy and hard.”

He thinks that know-how has modified the character of music. “Should you take heed to Bob Dylan and different stuff, it virtually sounds vintage,” he stated. “Every little thing now has obtained this contemporary sound. They’ve obtained synthesizers, they’ve obtained auto-tuning.” And, he posited, “I believe one of many causes basic rock won’t ever come again is, younger persons are being tuned to this new stage” that makes previous music appear “tame, identical to I used to think about Frank Sinatra.”

Way back to 2008 and 2009, he stated, he noticed the writing on the wall concerning the web superseding magazines.

Folks thought they needed to get into the journal sport, he stated, “however as soon as they get in and uncover it’s going to lose $10 million a yr for the subsequent three years, they’re like, ‘I don’t find out about this.’ No huge firm needed to purchase Rolling Stone. All of them knew what was occurring.”

David Pecker, the writer of the Nationwide Enquirer, purchased Mr. Wenner’s Us Weekly for over $100 million in 2017. At one lunch, Mr. Wenner recalled, Mr. Pecker stated that on the Enquirer, “he had been shopping for after which spiking tales from ladies who had been sleeping with Trump..”

Journalism was shifting towards bullet factors, away from 10,000-word articles. Celebrities most well-liked to be interviewed by different pleasant celebrities, they usually have been asking for editorial management, proper right down to writing their very own captions.

“It’s like everyone’s Tom Cruise swiftly,” Mr. Wenner keened. “He says nothing.”

Mr. Wenner had been grooming Gus to take over, however handing over the keys was troublesome. Gus was “my usurping doppelgänger,” he writes.

“It took me some time to get used to not being in cost and that was powerful,” he admitted. “Clearly, Gus had his concepts about what he needed to do with Rolling Stone, and it was time for it to alter.”

His chief monetary officer, Tim Walsh, instructed him he must promote Rolling Stone.

The journal that began with a zeal to tackle the Man ended up going to 2 scions. The brand new proprietor is Jay Penske, whose father was Roger Penske, the previous racecar driver turned billionaire businessman, and he elevated Gus Wenner to C.E.O.

“No extra child boomer, old-white-guy covers,” Mr. Wenner dryly famous about his closing cowl, a Bono interview.

The brand new crew rapidly started firing a few of Rolling Stone’s veteran writers and photographers.

“I needed to stay with Rolling Stone, to have some relationship with my child,” Mr. Wenner writes. “Might I be the uncle? The grandpa? The brother-in-law? Nope, I might be the ex-wife. Gus needed to take over. He listened to me with respect however impatience.”

As we ate peach sorbet with peaches, Mr. Wenner laughed ruefully. “I stated, ‘Don’t minimize me out’ and he was slicing me out. I went to him and stated ‘Geez, I’m right here.’ You uncover they don’t really want the good thing about your recommendation that a lot. Sure, it might have been useful on a few particular events however I assume it’s extra necessary they obtained out on their very own.”

He writes: “In fact, I used to be now in my seventies, standing in the best way of progress, stubbornly locked in my workplace listening, it was assumed, to Bob Dylan and Neil Younger. I used to be not invited to conferences. What ought to have been an thrilling redesign and translation of Rolling Stone from a newsmagazine to a characteristic journal ended up garbled and lackluster.”

Mr. Wenner saved coming to the workplace, like Citizen Kane on a walker. Typically, he and Gus would disagree; generally they might go smoke “a grit” on a bench outdoors.

He instructed me he turned what he hates most: a cliché, “the grumpy previous man left behind by the forces of time and historical past.”

Lastly, Mr. Wenner writes, Gus delivered the message: “I used to be out.”

However, Mr. Wenner assured me, Gus dealt with him with T.L.C.: “Gus bought and saved the journal. He has accomplished an excellent job with it.” Mr. Wenner added that “Gus transitioned it to a brand new era and a brand new music. I might by no means have accomplished it.” In April, Axios reported that Gus Wenner stated the journal had had its most worthwhile yr “in twenty years.”

For his half, Gus known as his father his “greatest buddy and biggest mentor,” including: “If we didn’t disagree right here and there alongside the best way, I might in all probability not be minimize out for the job.”

Does the daddy learn the son’s Rolling Stone?

“I don’t learn Rolling Stone that a lot,” Mr. Wenner replied. “I don’t learn that many magazines. It’s about folks I’m not personally desirous about. I don’t actually take care of Ok-pop. I don’t actually know who Cardi B is.”

Latest Rolling Stone covers have included the YouTube star MrBeast and JLo in a jumpsuit with a plunging neckline.

“An enormous distinction,” he stated. “John Lennon being bare on the duvet was an announcement. How would the most well-liked man on the planet be keen to exit and be bare?” He added, “It’s so destroying.”

They have been “keen to position their fame, to place it in peril” to make the assertion: “‘Right here’s the sincere fact about folks, about intercourse, about nudity.’ Now JLo goes out and it’s like, ‘I’m doing this to promote like scorching desserts. I’m not doing this for a cause.’”

I couldn’t finish with out asking the desert island discs query. What would he deliver?

His supplied this checklist: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by Nina Simone. “Speedway at Nazareth” by Mark Knopfler. “The Ghost of Tom Joad” by Bruce Springsteen. “Moondance” by Van Morrison. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Lengthy” by Otis Redding. “Desolation Row” by Bob Dylan. “Crying” by Roy Orbison. “Assume” by Aretha Franklin. “Stunning Day,” by U2. “Underneath My Thumb,” by the Stones. “Think about,” by John Lennon.

“Looks as if a reasonably cool cat,” he stated about himself.

Affirm or Deny

Maureen Dowd: Bob Dylan shakes fingers like a useless fish.

Jann Wenner: Sure, bizarre. Within the early days, it was a approach to set up dominance. “What are you to me? What? Huh?”

Paul Simon is a buzz kill.

(Guffawing) Sure.

You slept with Mick Jagger.

Swishful pondering, as Bette Midler would say. I by no means slept with a rock star.

Bruce Springsteen makes use of the phrase “pope” as a verb.

Sure. We have been driving in a automotive to the airport and he says, now watch me, I’m going to pope it. Then he rolls down the window, and because the crowd goes by, he waves just like the pope.

You traded your tickets to the Beatles’s final present for 30 hits of LSD.

You couldn’t hear the Beatles for all of the screaming. I obtained the higher discount.

LSD use was a litmus take a look at for brand new Rolling Stone hires.

Not true. However within the early days, I needed to know if they’d. Like what state of mind this particular person could be in, what was their philosophical bent?

Michael Jackson shouldn’t be the topic of a musical on Broadway that’s common with kids.

I don’t see any worth in canceling him or pretending that he wasn’t a baby molester or any worth in not listening, and I believe we lose one thing not listening to his music.

You have been ensorcelled by Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

She smiled at you and it was just like the solar got here out. You simply delight in that focus of hers and the eyes and the delight. She might give attention to you. She was actually sensible.

You have been in a two-man guide membership with David Bowie.

He turned me on to Junot Díaz. He was actually the definition of erudite. And he additionally was dedicated to avant-garde. He was not desirous about conventional writing.

Keith Richards accused you of nicking the identify of his band.

True.

Bob Dylan was jealous that you just gave the Rolling Stones credit score for the identify of the journal. And Mick stated that with out him and Keith, your journal would’ve been known as Herman Hermits’ Weekly.

True.

You tried to get Tom Wolfe to alter Sherman McCoy’s job in “Bonfire of the Vanities” from a bond dealer to a author since you stated nobody was desirous about Wall Road.

That’s true. I used to be actually improper.

Tom Wolfe was the primary particular person to inform you about rap and he wrote his personal rap lyrics. He preferred to go to Harlem and the Bronx to observe the crews battle it out.

Sure.

You sniffed coke whereas being interviewed by a Columbia Journalism Evaluate reporter.

I used to be underneath his affect.

You chop the testicles off Ken Kesey’s cows.

Sure, that’s true.

You added an additional N to your identify in highschool to look cooler.

Sure, to look cooler.

You like drill music.

What’s drill music?

Jack Nicholson introduced a transportable ashtray to the Clinton Inaugural.

It was so cool. You’re not imagined to smoke there however he had slightly brass round container with a lid on. He pulled it out of his pocket and smoked, and no person bothered him in any respect as a result of he had simply come off of doing “A Few Good Males,” so all of the Marines and safety on the inauguration wouldn’t contact him. They cherished Jack.

You’ve appeared in a number of films. However not but within the function that Michael Douglas stated could be essentially the most pure match for you: a coldblooded hit man.

The story of my life. I might have accomplished Whitey Bulger.

To your cameo in Cameron Crowe’s “Virtually Well-known,” your credit score learn “Legend in Cab.”

Sure.

In an interview for a Rolling Stone cowl story, Madonna instructed Carrie Fisher she didn’t wish to carry out oral intercourse.

(Laughing) I believed, that’s fairly egocentric.

The Stones track “Reminiscence Motel” was written about Annie Leibovitz.

Sure. She was protecting the Stones at the moment and he or she and Mick have been sleeping collectively.

Kurt Cobain was his era’s John Lennon.

That’s what my youthful staffers stated on the time. I didn’t need to problem them at that second however thought the concept was hyperbolic and emotional. There was one thing to be stated about their response to his loss of life being related with ours to Lennon, however to match the precise artists for his or her work is far-fetched.

You agree with Jimmy Buffett that nothing is price saying or listening to after 1 a.m.

More true phrases have by no means been spoken.